I recently re-read The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorite books in grade school, and still holds up fairly well ten-to-fifteen years later. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it, but it largely centers around a boy named Milo who is convinced he lives this boring life and is content to just slump his way through it, until one day there is a mysterious package waiting for him when he gets home, which contains the titular tollbooth. Milo assembles the tollbooth, gets in a toy car, and suddenly is in a magical land of logic, numbers, words, ideas, and more puns than you can shake a stick at. He makes some friends, goes on a Quest, becomes a hero, and returns home a little more mentally stimulated and less bored.

This structure is the cousin of the Quest: the Voyage and Return.

Yeah, like you’re going to see a list of plot types that doesn’t include the Quest. The Quest is a search for a place, item, or person that requires the hero to leave home in order to find it. Sometimes the item is just a MacGuffin to drive the plot along; other times the thing driving the quest is specific to the story’s circumstances. Either way, the hero is leaving home to find whatever the heck the story demands, and we get to come along for the ride.

Everyone loves a success story, especially when it results from years of hard work and the protagonist has struggled from the depths of despair. This story type is so beloved, that it is Charles Booker’s second plot type of seven: Rags to Riches.

My roommate and I spent a good chunk of Sunday evening watching Avatar on FX since neither of us had seen it, and it was apparently a huge deal when I was out of the country for eleven months. As we were watching, I said to her, “This is kind of like Pocahontas meets Fern Gully, but with sex.” She agreed, which got me thinking about the fact that a lot of our literature, television, and film is similar.

Christopher Booker had the same idea in 2004, and wrote The Seven Basic Plots, which argues that all stories told in any medium can be categorized into one of seven archetypes. Today, we’re covering the first plot: Overcoming the Monster.

Sometimes when you’re writing, you get so caught up in where your story is going that you’ve forgotten a few details that you previously established at the beginning of your book.

Sometimes those details are smaller, like having a character approach your protagonist from behind when you’ve established that the protagonist is on the top row of the stadium bleachers, and there is no way you can sneak up on them from behind. Sometimes those details are bigger, like a previously-unbeatable monster suddenly being dispatched with ease with a butter knife.

These inconsistencies are called plot holes.

Foreshadowing is common enough in storytelling: the burning scar of Harry Potter, Peeta Mellark’s ability to frost cakes, all the hand motifs in Arrested Development, everything in LOST. A well-placed note of foreshadowing can come back to the reader as a smack on the head or a revelatory twist ending. One of the most well-known foreshadowing techniques gets its name from the playwright Anton Chekhov. He famously said that if there is a rifle onstage in the first act, then it absolutely must go off in the second or third act. If it’s not going to go off, it’s got no business being present.

This object, skill, or other source of foreshadowing is referred to as Chekhov’s gun.